British finance is having a moment of existential angst after the owner of Arm Ltd. said it was leaning toward listing the chip designer—Britain’s biggest tech company—on Nasdaq rather than the London Stock Exchange .
Weighing on the British mind: Is London, for centuries a center of global finance, becoming a backwater? It has few of the go-go technology and biotech stocks that offer growth. The total value of the FTSE 100, the local benchmark, is only fractionally more than that of Apple , and it is dominated by the businesses of the last century: banks, oil, miners, tobacco and pharmaceuticals. The index only has four tech stocks, and partly as a result it is one of the cheapest markets in the world.
